Bringing a classic to life

While writing his delightful biography of E.B. White, The Story of Charlotte’s Web, Michael Sims gained a new appreciation for this childhood classic and its eccentric creator.Do you remember reading Charlotte’s Web as a child? Sadly, I didn’t read it in childhood, for two dumb reasons. First, I saw the cover and thought that...

Modern love

Michael Barson has been a comics collector for decades, in addition to his day job as co-director of publicity for Putnam/Riverhead Publishing. He’s collected some of the finest examples of 1940s and 1950s love comics in the new anthology Agonizing Love.In the panels of the brightly colored comics that once filled newsstands, young women...

Family guy

As a first-time mother trying to make sense of a colicky newborn—one who seemingly needed only a few minutes of sleep every 24 hours—only one thing saved me from running screaming from the house. It was Operating Instructions by Anne Lamott, a hilarious, self-deprecating memoir chronicling her experience as a new mom. I read it...

Food for thought

Worried about what to eat? Michael Pollan's new "eater's manifesto," In Defense of Food, offers remarkably simple, practical advice on the question. "In a way I've written a book that comes down to seven words," Pollan says during a call to his home in Berkeley, California. " 'Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.'...

Austin noir

Tucked away in the closet of Michael Simon's New York apartment is a roll of butcher paper that measures roughly three feet wide and 16 feet long. Unfurl it and you'll discover a detailed roadmap of the intricately woven plot of his totally absorbing first novel, Dirty Sally, a detective thriller set in Austin, Texas, during the late 1980s....

Anatomy lessons

Michael Sims promised his friends that writing Adam's Navel would put an end to his frequent and, shall we say, enthusiastic communications about the latest set of whizzbang facts and oddities he had discovered in his wide and voracious reading.Unfortunately, the completion of his second book, a fascinating, witty and startlingly original...

Hard-bitten Bosch tells all

The best fictional detectives are mysteries unto themselves: hard-bitten, world-weary, troubled souls who keep the dark, uncomfortable corners of their past clearly marked off-limits by yellow police tape.So it comes as a surprise when the moodiest of the lot, L.A. Homicide Detective Hieronymus "Harry" Bosch, suddenly opens up as never...

Past and present

We invite you, dear readers, to peruse the pages of The Crimson Petal and the White, a deliciously Dickensian jaunt through Victorian London that smacks of the city's seedier quarters. Full of scheming whores, surly servants, simpering society ladies and smartly dressed gents, the book's as rollicking, bawdy and brilliant a yarn as aught that's...

Final deadline

Michael Connelly’s new book, The Scarecrow, hits bookstores this month, having garnered pre-release acclaim from every quarter. It is Connelly’s first novel to feature reporter Jack McEvoy since the runaway bestseller The Poet in 1996. Of all of the characters in Connelly books over the years, McEvoy has the trajectory that most...

Michael Lewis monitors social shuffling and feather ruffling

In his first book, the widely and deservedly praised Liar's Poker, Michael Lewis tweaked the noses of the powers-that-be at the investment banking firm Salomon Brothers and apparently provoked nary a ripple of recrimination. His sixth book, Next: The Future Just Happened, is not yet in bookstores and it has already infuriated former SEC...